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Good morning. News that Salesforce.com Inc.‘s profit forecast is somewhat lower than expected (more on that below) won’t come as a surprise to many CIOs. During a panel discussion at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Wednesday, Vanguard Health Systems Inc. CIO Scott Blanchette said the traditional argument that cloud-based software allows IT leaders to tap into their operating budgets rather than requesting capital for software and hardware investments holds less water in a low-interest-rate environment when “money is essentially free.”

Whilethe hype suggests that CIOs are ditching on-premise software in droves for the maintenance-free comforts of cloud computing, the reality is different. As Mr. Blanchette noted, the value propositions from cloud vendors must be “drastically better” than those of on-premise software vendors to win his business. “If the solution isn’t better, faster or cheaper than what I have organically, it’s not an attractive alternative other than risk transference,” said Mr. Blanchette.

In this second article in a two-part series, Sonny Garg, senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer at Exelon Corp., the $27.4 billion competitive energy provider based in Chicago, describes the structure and inner workings of his emerging technologies team.